Opinion: There’s another option when the answer to ‘can I retire’ is ‘not yet’

Being willing to look at the retirement problem differently can reveal other options

Courtesy Everett Collection

By

ChrisMamula

It is pretty safe to assume that if you are reading this you have an interest in knowing whether you can retire now.

The question may have been thrust upon you by an employer who decided that your services were no longer required. Or maybe health issues forced you out of the workforce earlier than expected, or are making life unbearable while working.

You may badly want to retire. Yet when you face financial reality, the answer to the retirement question is a clear no.

For others, the answer is unclear. You need to estimate health-care expenses, your lifespan, taxes, future investment returns, interest rates and inflation over decades to make an informed retirement decision. But none of these factors is knowable with certainty.

Miscalculation in any of these areas can cause drastically divergent retirement outcomes. The longer the retirement horizon, the greater the impact of even small miscalculations. This can cause people to become trapped with stress, anxiety, and fear.

Many either cannot retire yet or aren’t sure whether you can. So where do you go from here? Can this be a good thing?

You can’t always get what you want

Not long after beginning my career, I started to burn out. I started flirting with the idea of early retirement, but didn’t consider it a realistic possibility.

Five years ago, my cousin passed away in her early 40s after losing a battle with cancer. A month later, my daughter was born. These events, occurring in such proximity, made me question what really was important in life.

I became acutely aware that I was not spending my time the way I wanted. I began getting serious about retirement planning, more sure than ever that early retirement was what I wanted.

This was depressing. I felt trapped and wanted out of the life I was living, but didn’t see a way.

Sometimes you get what you need

I continued to save aggressively and read everything I could about retirement planning. My initial strategy was to accelerate the early retirement process. As my learning continued, I began to see many challenges inherent in traditional retirement.

Traditional retirement isn’t the panacea for life’s problems I originally envisioned. The idea of living life constrained to a budget was unappealing. I also realized that I was running away from things I didn’t like in life without any idea where I was actually going.

In retrospect, not being able to retire — as I so badly wanted — was a good thing. It gave me what I needed — time to ask better questions and seek better alternatives. This allowed me to improve my life while designing a more desirable long-term future. I encourage you to do the same.

What do you really want?

A great place to start your retirement planning is to set aside some time to think about what you really want in life. It can be valuable to journal or discuss this with trusted advisers.

I thought I wanted retirement. After digging deeper, I found I wanted much more than traditional retirement could provide.

A desire to regain control of my time is what initially drove me to seek early retirement. I wanted freedom to spend time on the things I found most important without being constrained by someone else’s schedule. This didn’t seem possible while practicing physical therapy. I also wanted to be done with the ever-growing administrative demands of my job. However, time and freedom are not the only things I value.

Happiness is about living life in alignment with your personal values. I also value financial prosperity, serving and helping others, personal growth and development, and accomplishing personal goals. These values are all compatible with work. Some are actually more elusive if you limit yourself to a traditional retirement, defined as not working at all.

Progressive freedom

It is easy to think of work and retirement as a dichotomy. You are working or you are retired. Life is rarely this black and white.

You don’t need to be fully financially independent and ready to retire to start improving your lifestyle. Once you gain clarity on what you want and set aside self-limiting beliefs, you can begin to pursue change immediately.

Improve your work conditions

If you are not in financial position to leave work permanently, start by looking for ways to optimize your working conditions. This can include working less. This could mean negotiating increased vacation time, a sabbatical, or going part-time. You can also look for ways to eliminate parts of your job you find undesirable.

Conventional wisdom says this is pie-in-the-sky thinking. In reality, it may be far easier than you think. If you have worked hard in your career while also working on your personal finances, you’ve given yourself great leverage to negotiate.

An employer may find it easier and more profitable to make concessions to keep a valuable worker than to have to replace the person. As you progress toward financial independence, you can negotiate from a position of power if you are willing and able to walk away.

In my final years at my job, I was able to stop the portion of my job that required me to work evenings and weekends. I also negotiated away pay raises for additional vacation time. My wife had a similar experience after deciding she never wanted to return to full-time work after having our daughter. She negotiated to work part-time, from home, and with a flexible schedule.

Consider a phased or transitional retirement

Those in a two-income situation have another option for flexibility. Rather than syncing your retirement process, one partner can retire or start cutting back sooner. This is another strategy we employed, giving us a more desirable lifestyle and allowing us to ease into retirement.

For five years, my wife worked part time while I continued full-time. Because she worked fewer hours and had no commute, she agreed to take on the lion’s share of the housework. While we were both still busier than we would have liked, this extra time drastically improved our lifestyle.

I retired from my job in December, but my wife continues to work in her part-time position. Our roles at home have shifted with me taking on the bulk of the household chores. She now has more time and less stress while not changing her work situation at all.

This helped us get past the fear of making a big change. We also benefit from her continued income and ability to get affordable health insurance. This allows us to live a far better lifestyle with no financial stress.

A non-traditional retirement

AARP developed the Life Reimagined program to help people navigate the many challenges associated with traditional retirement. There is also Encore.org, an organization dedicated to helping people with the financial and emotional challenges of traditional retirement by finding meaningful second-act careers.

Michael Kitces recently wrote about the three types of retirement: traditional retirement, semi-retirement, and temporary retirement/sabbaticals. Kitces noted the growing popularity of alternative approaches to retirement and cited a statistic that only half of retirees plan to not work again.

It is easy to say non-traditional retirement is “not really retiring”. I would argue that everything goes back to determining what you truly want. If your goal is to never work again, choose traditional retirement. However, if you really want to design your ideal lifestyle, have both abundance and security and do it quickly, then you’ll need to be more flexible and creative.

Falling into the all-or-nothing thinking of traditional retirement can be stressful to those that cannot retire and can trap those on the fence. Being willing to simply look at the problem through a different lens can expose different options. You may find that what you really want is closer than you first thought.

Chris Mamula used principles of traditional retirement planning, combined with creative lifestyle design, to retire from a career as a physical therapist at age 41. This is adapted from a post on the blog site Can I Retire Yet?

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